I get a guaranteed laugh from my dance-critic friends when I tell them the projected opening line of the autobiography that I plan never to write: “Edward Villella made me a homosexual.” They laugh because they are among the few who understand both the truth of the statement and its absurdity. Mr. Villella, whom I have never met, is probably one of the straightest men ever to don ballet slippers and tights. He didn’t realize he was making me a homosexual, as the second projected sentence of that never-to-be-written autobiography explains, because he was busy dancing the “Trepak” in The Nutcracker at the time, and I was only one of dozens of preadolescent kids in the audience, our eyes goggling with amazement as we watched his spectacular leaps and spins. His performance did not make me want to become a dancer—I was preternaturally nervous and clumsy as a child, and remain so now that I am an old man—but it made me want to belong to someone with the extraordinary athleticism, beauty, and charisma that are summed up in the phrase Edward Villella dancing.
I saw Villella dance many times after that. I even saw him speak a little dialogue, as Harry Beaton in the 1963 City Center revival of Brigadoon. Among the immense clutter that crowds my mind are many, many images of Edward Villella, airborne or crouching, lifting his partner or dashing around her in circles, twirling, tumbling, extending his arms, or kicking up his heels.
The images all came crowding back, this past month, when I started seeing Facebook posts about someone named Lara Spencer, whom I had never heard of. (I don’t watch television, and generally find it wisest to keep my distance from contemporary culture, though I try to stay informed about it.) Ms. Spencer, it developed, is a host on Good Morning America—a TV show I actually had heard of—who was under fire for having ridiculed, on the air, a 6-year-old boy for taking a ballet class. Her situation was not helped by the fact that her target of choice was Prince George, a scion of the British royal family. Ridiculing a 6-year-old is bad enough, but ridiculing a 6-year-old crown prince can get you into really hot water. At any rate, on the next week’s first episode, Ms. Spencer apologized tearfully, and held a televised powwow with three currently famous male dancers, including Robert Fairchild, who talked about how important dance was to them, how painful had been the ridicule they were forced to endure as youngsters when first learning, and how grateful they were to her for coming forward and turning a bad example into a good one.
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It was all very nice and worthy, and probably fulfilled a useful function as a sort of apologetic public service announcement. But what struck me most—and made all my memories of the airborne Villella come flooding back—was the utter absence from the entire incident of any context, any history, any awareness that any such thing had ever gone on in the world before Ms. Spencer’s ridicule of Prince George made it an incident. I don’t know how old Lara Spencer is. I assume that to host a segment of Good Morning America, you have to be at least of voting age. But can there really be any in-the-know person of that age who has never heard of, or ever seen any version of, Billy Elliot? Or to go a step further: Even if she had known nothing about the prominent male dancers of our own day—and she was able to round up three of them quickly enough for her tearful encounter group—had she never heard of, or seen any version of, A Chorus Line, which is produced unremittingly all over the U.S.? Or that she knew nothing of West Side Story, even though news of its upcoming Broadway revival and film remake, under two very divergent sets of big-name creative hands, constantly comes our way? No, it was too improbable.
And then there is the whole world of actual ballet, in which George Balanchine, starting 70 years ago, had spent half his life creating virile, sexy, athletic male premiers danseurs whom he hoped could lift for America the stigma of effeminacy that hung over any male with the desire to dance: Jacques d’Amboise, Arthur Mitchell, and my childhood fantasy object, Edward Villella—not to mention their many brilliant successors, like Robert La Fosse and Ethan Stiefel. Ballet had made news—even front-page news, with the defections from Soviet Russia of Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Then, too, there were all the modern dancers, including the great male dancer-choreographers formed in the crucible of Martha Graham’s company: Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Paul Taylor. There were the great male dancers of films past: Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the astounding Nicholas Brothers. And far back, more than a century back, there was Nijinsky. No film footage of him exists, but there are photographs in plenty, and enough books, plays, and films have exploited the more lurid aspects of his life story to make his name if not a household word, at least a cultural touchstone for people who—because they do things like hosting prominent national television shows—are assumed to be at least somewhat knowledgeable.
But that is precisely the nub of my concern, which is not an attack on Lara Spencer and is not directed against her. My concern is a general lament, not only about the public image of male dancers but about everything that the arts offer to human beings. The cultural forms and images that make us human, that give shape and meaning and memory to our collective life as a species, are being increasingly forgotten. We live, increasingly, in a technological isolation, estranged from the best selves that works of art inspire us to create within our souls.
This is not a quiz show; culture is not a matter of knowing the names of more male dancers than the next guy. But the idea that someone of Lara Spencer’s age can have lived oblivious up till now of the changing sensibility that surrounds her, the steadily increasing public joy in the great possibilities of male dancers and male choreographers—it is too puzzling, and a little too terrifying, to contemplate. It’s not an issue of her knowing any specific thing: Maybe she never watched Chris Gillis dance the lead in Paul Taylor’s Speaking in Tongues; maybe she never saw the clip (though I feel sure it’s on YouTube) of Tommy Rall and Ann Miller dancing “From This Moment On” on the rooftop in the film of Kiss Me, Kate. Maybe, because Americans hate history, she is one of those unfortunate people who never heard of Nijinsky, or perhaps not even of Balanchine. That’s okay. As I said, it isn’t about memorizing and reciting back the names. But when something has been in the air around you for more than a century, and steadily developed into a cultural trend, how can you fail to notice? Even more, how can you fall, facilely, into some antique prejudice, which you then turn around and apologize for, meekly, when there is a public outcry? It implies that you live in some kind of sealed room, or perhaps a Skinner box, where you nestle unnoticing while the life of the world goes on around you, ever changing.
And please don’t think that I am accusing Ms. Spencer of prejudice. No: A prejudiced person notices the change in the surrounding world, and puts up bigotry as a stand against it. Yes, a great many émigrés from various African countries, some of them practicing Muslims, now live in the northern Midwest. Either you can greet them as neighbors and hope they become friends, or you can turn your back on them and shout “Go back where you came from.” But you can’t not notice their presence. This, you might think, is not a cultural issue. But it is, and it is exactly the same issue as ridiculing a male child for learning ballet. They are different from me; they go to the mosque on Friday while I go to church on Sunday; they practice entrechat and tour jeté while I mow the lawn and drive to the supermarket. They talk a funny language that I don’t understand.
Art, including the art of dance, exists precisely so that we can understand not the funny language artists speak but the hopes and sorrows and delights and confusions that they experience. I couldn’t tell you what a tour jeté is either, though I’m sure I have seen thousands of them in my lifetime. But I can tell you when a dance is expressing anguish or passion or exhilaration, or even just the joy of formality, of dancers moving together in unison. In the 1970s, when I was in my 30s, the Martha Graham Dance Company revived many of Graham’s earlier dances, not seen for many years, and I went to a performance of Diversion of Angels, which I had seen only once before when I was perhaps 11 or 12 years old. There is a moment in Diversion of Angels where all the dancers rush upstage, then suddenly turn and halt. And watching it, at BAM in the mid-1970s, I started to cry—not only because I suddenly remembered how, as a child, I had been struck by the beauty of that moment, but also because I knew that I was no longer 11 years old, and the beauty of watching that dance as a child could never come back to me except as a memory. Art goes to our soul and makes us uncomfortable. It teaches us about others, not by hectoring but by informing us about ourselves. And maybe we don’t always like what we learn. But that—and not earning a big salary or buying a second home—is what we are here for.
One of the dancers in Ms. Spencer’s apologia mentioned how he had idolized Gene Kelly, and they showed a clip of some of Kelly’s fancier moves from Singin’ in the Rain. I was glad of that; it was the only place where the session seemed to link what was being discussed with the world beyond. I like art and need it because I am a solipsist, frequently lost in my own thoughts and preoccupied with my own needs. In that respect, I am much too much like the people who have heard of nothing and care about nothing but themselves. Spiritually, art is the counter to that—the leavening that makes the bread of our souls rise, and keeps us from becoming dry and flat. I grieve for Ms. Spencer, and for the millions I suspect of being like her—not because I think she has a petty prejudice against boys who study ballet, but because she could watch such a thing and not think “Wait, there was Billy Elliot. There was Baryshnikov. There was Fred Astaire.” Or maybe, if she had been lucky enough to be my age, she might even have thought of Edward Villella dancing, and known what it is to fall hopelessly in love.
